Finally The Way It Should Have Been
by SoulSurferfan116
Summary: Lauren and Stephen fic...Lauren finally is ready to move on from Stephen, at least that's what she's telling herself. What happens when he realizes he actually wants to be with her too! First Laguna Beach Oneshot! No Flames please! : R and R please!


Finally The Way It Should Have Been

**Disclaimer: I do not own Laguna Beach or any of the characters mentioned in this story!**

**AN: I'm currently on a Stephen/Lauren kick right now, so expect more soon. This is Lauren's POV by the way!**

**Reviews are appreciated!**

_"When we go to San Francisco, that's it, I'm leaving Kristin behind. I'm not gonna need the excess drama she seems to bring into my life, when I could be partying it up and having fun with you. Plus, Cabo proved that it wouldn't take her five minutes after I'd left before she was off with some other guy if we stayed together. There's just no point anymore. It's gonna be me and you, LC. Partying it up in the beautiful city of San Francisco."_ He'd told me, and I'd had no reason not to believe him at the time, despite the fact he'd also told me they were done in Cabo, and many other times throughout the duration of their relationship. Maybe I believed that the distance would be what kept them apart this time around. Maybe I was just holding on to long lingering hopes that San Francisco would finally be what allowed Stephen and I to be together, a hope I'd been holding onto since I was young enough to hope.

And it had proceeded to entertain those hopes for a while. We'd had a rough year back in Laguna in our final year of high school, with Kristin at the root of it all, but our friendship had managed to battle its way through the storm of his relationship with Kristin and his inability to stop kissing me at the same time. San Francisco had rebuilt us stronger than ever, from the moment I saw Stephen waiting for me as I exited the airport in San Francisco. That was the beginning of small, albeit unnecessary, things that Stephen would do for me as we began our life in San Francisco. Some days he'd show up early in the morning to drive me to classes, or stop in on his way home with dinner. Occasionally it was just a phone call or a text message or a flower, but he was trying to make up for all the heartbreak he'd caused me in the previous year, and fix the mistakes he'd made. He'd kiss me, promise me that there was no more Kristin, and that the future was him and I; in fact, he probably had nearly promised me the world, and in that one breath between kisses, it would be right back to Kristin, her apologies, and they'd pick right up where they left off.

And for some reason, I thought San Francisco had changed that about him. That he'd left the betrayal and the lies and the mistakes behind. We'd fallen into a routine of dinner twice a week, one night I'd take it to him, and one night he'd bring it to me, a movie, and a general catch up. If classes permitted it, we'd see each other more nights in a week too, but we promised each other that there would be those two nights without fail. We weren't together, yet we weren't exactly seeing anyone else either. We'd fallen in between once again, almost mirroring our relationship in Laguna, hiding under the somewhat false pretence of friends, but the kisses screamed that there was something more behind it.

Maybe that something was worth chasing, but for me and for my heart, already fractured too many times by Stephen Colletti, I wasn't willing to chase something that kept running away and leading me astray.

So I kissed him and revelled in the knowledge that for once he wasn't kissing anyone else in the pause we took to breathe, and that he wasn't going to break my heart just yet.

I fell into allowing the comfort back into my life and forgetting the heartbreak he'd once created on my heart, gaining my comfort both from him and from knowing that Kristin was wrecking havoc on guy's hearts back in Laguna, six hours drive away from here. Maybe I fell too fast into the comfort, and fell too blindly in thinking I was safe in our current relationship, the in between that actually was more like us stuck in the middle in no mans land. Our routine, our moving on, the safety I'd garnered in the comfort of a new city, I laid all my hopes on that being what would hold us together and keep us together once school ended and we were back in Laguna.

And of course that day came too sooner than expected, home for break, and all I wanted to do was stay in our security net of San Francisco and our routine, fearful of what would happen as we left our bubble. The irony of living in a bubble in San Francisco was that growing up in Laguna, all teenagers complained about living in the bubble. We longed to escape from it and be free from it, yet I'd formed a new bubble in San Francisco, a bubble filled with naivety and what could only be described as false gullibility. I didn't want to believe that it could take one little pin prick in the shape of Kristin Cavallari for our bubble to burst, or that Stephen would interrupt our routine with a girl, from the past or new entirely.

I didn't think he'd do that to me again.

After everything.

And then a phone call came in the middle of the night to my cellphone as I slept in my room at my parents house, and I fumbled for it in the dark. Heavy breathing answered my hello, and the sounds of Stephen obviously pulling a shirt or a sweatshirt on.

"I'm sorry it's late… but can you come and get me? I'm in trouble."

"Where are you?" I mumbled, all but ready to bury my head under the pillow and go back to sleep. "Are you at your house?"

"I'm at…' muffled voices interrupted him as he talked in the background to somebody and a vaguely familiar mans voice yelled something about always liking Stephen but this was disrespectful. The fall of my heart told me I knew exactly whose house he was at, whose father was screaming in the background, but my falling heart needed to hear the words come out of his mouth before it could fall completely and shatter. Finally I heard a door shut as he came back on the line. "I'm at Kristin's. Can you please come? She picked me up. I'm in trouble." He repeated the last line again.

My heart stopped beating at her name, as my breath caught in my throat. I clicked the phone off, already reaching for my keys, wondering what exactly I could've said at the end of that conversation, mind running ahead contemplating exactly why he would be in trouble for being at Kristin's.

As my breathing and heart rate returned to my body, it stopped in the instant I saw Stephen at the bottom of Kristin's street, sitting under a street light waiting.

His silence filled my mind with endless questions that begged for responses, and finally I asked, "Are you okay?"

He nodded in the lights from oncoming cars, and I continued staring out the window.

"Why are you in trouble?" Both my eyes and my heart begged and pleaded with him in that moment not to give me the answer I knew was coming.

"It was nothing. We weren't doing anything. We were just lying in her bed and we got caught and her dad freaked out. We're just friends."

I fought the urge to laugh in his face. Just friends? Just like us.

"He got mad because you were in bed doing nothing. That's a little out of order."

Don't tell me anything else, Stephen, I begged silently in the darkness of my car, taking comfort in the fact that he couldn't see the tears already starting to slide down my cheeks.

"Well, neither of us were wearing shirts."

I didn't know my heart could fall any faster or lower than it had already, and then I felt it shatter as he finished his sentence. And all of a sudden I wanted to do something I had yet to do during the course of the relationship and friendship I'd had with Stephen in the past two years. I wanted to scream at him for getting my hopes up again, for breaking all those promises he probably hadn't realised he'd been making, I wanted to scream at myself for believing his words when he said him and Kristin were done for good, I wanted to scream that obviously they weren't just friends and maybe he didn't know what just friends were because that's what we were meant to be and if that's what we were then it wouldn't be hurting as bad as it was to hear that his heart, as it maybe always had, still belonged to Kristin, and not me. The girl who wouldn't put him through anything she would.

The car was silent as all my angry thoughts raged through my mind. And finally as we turned onto his parent's street, one slipped past my lips, and out into the already tense car.

"Obviously you're not just friends, are you? Just like we weren't exactly friends all those times up in San Francisco when we were kissing and dating but not quite dating and together but not. I guess I forgot that when it comes to you, I don't have a claim on you. I never did." And the words came tumbling out before I could stop them, as our already fragile friendship shattered right onto the floor beside the pieces of my heart.

As I pulled into his driveway, for once leaving the engine running and remaining seated, he smacked his hands against the dashboard making me jump slightly, as he whispered his apology.

"You aren't sorry Stephen, that's the thing. You weren't sorry when you continued a relationship with both of us at the same time at the beginning of this whole triangle, you weren't sorry when you called me to pick you up tonight, scaring me when you told me you were in trouble. It's always the same with you, you say its over with her and kiss me like it actually is, but at the end of the day, you're weak when it comes to her. It's her you always go back to, time and time again, and it's back to treating me like a friend until the next time. Ever think that maybe I don't want to be second best any more? You can't apologise for not choosing me when I'm not the one you want. I can only apologise to myself for thinking that this time would be different. But I won't be the first heart you break, the last girl you wreck, and this time around I won't take you back. I won't fall for it again. We'll either be friends in the actual sense of the word, or nothing at all."

We lapsed into silence until finally he opened the door and the interior light clicked on.

"Goodbye Stephen." And even with all the pieces of my heart, I didn't want to think about the double meaning in that short sentence.

And as I drove past the beach where we'd spent so many hours together in the course of our long friendship, I had to pull over as the air from my lungs finally burst forth in release and my tears began to fall solidly as I leaned against the steering wheel.

Because, without realising it, I pretty much gave my heart back to him somewhere between his surprise arrival at the airport and his surprises during our first semester.

I guess the tag attached to it however was written in invisible ink, because I'm pretty sure the words said; "Be careful... extremely fragile."

And then my tears turned into bitter laughter as I realised that he'd featured into my decision about semester two. I didn't want to leave him in San Francisco, so when talking to my careers advisor, I knew I'd be staying. I didn't want to be without him, even though he couldn't fully be with me in the sense of handing over his whole heart. I knew that if I'd planned to leave and move up to LA or back to Laguna, if he'd asked me to stay I probably would've. Regardless of what our relationship status was at the time. He was weak for Kristin, and I was weak for him. He was the main feature of my thought process, and now I can't believe how naïve I was to include him into a plan about my future. My future, the same thing that equals out to be my everything.

One dislike growing up in Laguna was the fact that in such a small town, when you didn't want to see someone, you seemed to see them everywhere you went, whether it was the grocery store, the beach, or even the gas station. In the days that followed the end of my friendship with Stephen, I was positive I would have seen him everywhere I went. More than likely attached at the lips with Kristin. But I hadn't, and that seemed to be even harder on my heart than seeing him would have been.

Finally it was time to return to San Francisco and it felt like the first time I left, boarding a plane to unfamiliarity, not sure what would happen. This time I had no familiar faces to greet me at the airport or to remind me of home when I was homesick, and no matter how great my new friends at school were, none of them were Stephen, or Dieter, or Lo. And as much as I tried to lie to myself as I looked through the crowd of people at the airport in San Francisco, I found myself searching endlessly and hopefully for Stephen's face, the way it had been there to greet me when I disembarked the first time around.

It wasn't, and it hurt.

Because the realisation had now hit me that I was going to be experiencing San Francisco without him, all because of my inability to stay away from his lips and his inability to stay away from Kristin's.

Arriving to my apartment in a cab, there were no flowers taped to my door as Stephen had been known to do as a surprise after he had learnt I'd had a particularly heinous day, or to welcome me home after a weekend away. And I knew once I got inside there would be no message on the answering machine from him wondering what I was up to and if I wanted to catch up and have some dinner somewhere or see a movie or just chill. And as I saw my answering machine flashing with messages not from him, I spoke to him in the picture of us on the fridge near the phone, "I wish I missed you less."

And I did miss him. Not his lips and not his "love" but him and his friendship, and I hated the Stephen-shaped gap now left in my life and I didn't know what to do, despite that night parked in Stephen's driveway where I knew exactly what I was doing to our friendship as I began, continued and ended my tirade. When I was shattering our friendship to accompany my shattered heart. And that didn't even begin to compensate for the fact that Stephen knew exactly what he was doing when he called me that night closer to dawn than midnight, knowing exactly what affect it would have on me, on my heart and on our friendship.

In the days and weeks that followed, I found myself alone truly for the first time since I'd left Laguna to go to college. The nights that I'd usually spent with Stephen were the longest and most painful as I sat in my apartment, usually on the phone to Lo or Dieter both of whom would attempt to coax me into going out with my roommate or going out with other friends, but it didn't feel right to spend the two nights we'd promised each other would always be just for us with other friends or with other people, despite the fact that when I'd said goodbye to the darkness of my car and Stephen's retreating back, I'd said goodbye to our future, present and past as friends and as anything more.

A few weeks later as I sat at home on one such night, I was interrupted from the DVD I was trying to seek amusement from. My heart leaped in the hope that it was Dieter visiting a few days earlier than he'd initially promised, and I raced for the door.

The face standing before me as I pulled open the door wasn't that of my strictly platonic best friend, but that of Stephen, looking uncharacteristically nervous and not the usual laid-back relaxed guy I'd known for the majority of my life. One hand was poised to knock again, and one was holding two DVD's and a bag of Italian food from our favourite Italian restaurant here.

"This wasn't how I wanted to do this, but I didn't know how else to do it." He said after we'd stared at each other long enough for me to forget momentarily why I'd ever gotten mad at him in the first place and then recall the reason why in excruciating detail, almost like reliving the moment over again. "I brought your favourite DVD's," he continued as he followed me into the apartment and laid them on the table along with the food. The covers to my two favourite movies stared back at me, My Girl and its sequel, and I couldn't help but smile internally as I realised that he'd remembered, even though he couldn't remember things like how to keep promises.

And with that we settled in front of the TV in silence, far apart for the first time since this tradition began, and no words spoken until we watched the girl kiss an extremely young Macauly Culkin.

"Maybe friends should never kiss." I mused allowed, thinking about the grief the kiss I'd just witnessed on screen would later cause for the poor boy played by Macauly Culkin, and the friendship Stephen and I had shared almost been thrown away because of our kisses with each other and his kisses with other girls.

"Don't think that, LC. Don't say that."

"We personify that fact, Stephen, how can you say that?"

He sighed. "Look… what are you doing tomorrow night?" I shrugged, unsure.

"I'll come and pick you up then, okay? We'll go somewhere and try to make amends."

"Stephen, you don't have to make amends for anything. We're friends, we tried to warp the definition of a friend and it didn't work, and you wanted something else more, so you went for it and it just proved the fact that our warped definition of friends didn't work. Like I told you in the car, I won't be the last heart you break or the last girl you wreck."

"Maybe I don't want to make amends. Maybe I want to make new beginnings."

We lapsed into silence as his words lingered in the air between us, and I felt myself longing for his touch.

"Tomorrow night?" He asked as the credits rolled, and I confirmed it with a nod.

Time for his new beginnings or his amendments.

I found myself closing the door behind him with a million words I wished I'd said to him, a million words still haunting my mind. "I just want to be with you," being somewhere near the top of that list.

The following afternoon, Dieter appeared on my doorstep a day earlier than he'd planned but a day later than I'd hoped. His hug was more than a comfort on my nervous and frazzled heart, not yet ready for whatever the night's activities would bring.

"It's going to be okay, you know. You and he will work it out, as friends or as more."

"I'm sorry I've put you in this situation, you know, between your two best friends."

"You don't have to be sorry, you know? It's just one of those things. You can't help who you fall in love with."

"Well, this current situation is obviously a personification for that. I just really wish it was preventable, you know? I wish Stephen and I had never started kissing once we moved here. And I wish he'd called you instead of me that night back in Laguna."

"He's made mistakes; that's for sure. You have to know though that I'd definitely rather see you with him than Kristin with him any day. Maybe this time he's gonna make the right choice at the end of it. Now that you're this big tough girl in a big new city and he knows you aren't gonna wait around while he plays his games, and the fact that you walked away from the friendship probably gave him a wakeup call too."

"Have you seen him since you got here?" I stared at him, hoping for an honest answer.

"Yeah, I stopped in on my way over here."

"Any idea what his plan is for us tonight?" Dieter looked uncomfortable, but remained silent. "No hint, no comment, not even a place?"

"He was getting ready when I was there. You might want to get changed." I began getting up with a loud sigh. "And LC, all I can say about tonight is to take a jacket." I frowned at that information, before walking into my room.

As I stood at my mirror minutes later to apply makeup, I stared at the photos shoved in the frame of the mirror, ones of Stephen and me, Stephen, Dieter and me, and Lo and me. I looked forlornly at all the pictures, not wanting tonight to be the end of us, but knowing I had too many painful words in my heart that needed to be said for the evening to turn out any other way.

And wearing a jacket wouldn't prevent that.

I heard Dieter slam the front door shut and start talking away to someone outside my room, who I knew was Stephen. I pulled down my favourite picture of Stephen and I, taken on our first ever trip to San Francisco when we were checking out our colleges with Dieter and Trey. I never expected it to end up like this, now. And I found myself missing that Stephen and that LC and that friendship, despite Stephen being right outside my door presently.

The boys both looked up from the Xbox game they were playing as I came out into the lounge. Stephen stood up quickly, and smiled nervously at me.

"Hi. Uh, are you ready to go?" It was like a high school first date, although this time around it was with a guy I'd known most of my life, and wanted to be with for almost as long, and this time around it wasn't a date, but a discussion about the end of a friendship.

I nodded, and he spoke again. "You might want a jacket or a sweatshirt or something." I turned to the barstools by the kitchen and pulled a jacket off them as Dieter laughed. "Yeah, you know what Stephen's like, he's not gentlemanly enough to share."

We both laughed awkwardly, as Stephen began to move towards the door, exchanging hand slaps with Dieter, who began to get up off the couch and hug me tightly. "If you want me to come rescue you, call me okay? But as much as tonight might hurt, just hold it til I get there. Or hold it til he's finished, because you two obviously have a lot to talk about. But just hold it."

Every time I'd cried over a guy, mainly over Stephen, as Dieter held me and consoled me, he'd always told me to just hold it. And it was the most comforting thing to me, each and every time I heard it. It didn't change.

Stephen held open the door for me as he led me out to his truck, the same truck that had picked me up many times both in Laguna and in San Francisco, the same truck I recognised instantly as I walked out of the airport the first time in San Francisco, seeing it before I saw him. We drove in silence for a few minutes before Stephen spoke, and I'd still had yet to say a word to him. "I hope you're wearing comfortable shoes, there could be a walk."

"What, I don't get a piggy back? Jeez Stephen, that's mean. But no, I wore comfortable shoes, since I didn't know where we were going, and Dieter wouldn't tell me anything." I fake pouted and he laughed.

"Good, he wasn't supposed to tell you anything."

"Oh, so you do have a plan? We aren't going to spend hours wandering around the city because you're sure you saw a sign for something you wanted to check out, until you realise you saw it on the drive from Laguna, instead of actually in San Francisco?" We both laughed at the memory.

"No, I know that this is definitely in San Fran. I checked myself."

He pulled up into a car park and opened the door for me, before moving around to grab something from behind his seat. He pulled out a blanket and a sweatshirt, before smiling nervously at me. I used this time to gather my thoughts, my heart, and my breath, before moving in beside him to begin whatever this late afternoon excursion would bring; the new beginnings either as friends or as nothing at all.

"This is Vista Point." He informed me as we walked up the stairs to the top. I nodded, and our hands brushed together briefly. I pulled my hand away quickly, not wanting to feel his touch, knowing I'd never feel it again. And that knowledge made me want to grab his hand again at the same time.

As we reached the top we were greeted by an almost deserted circular marble deck, in the centre of which stood a bronze statue of a sailor. Stephen snuck up behind me and grabbed my hands to place them over my eyes. "No peeking," was all he whispered as he let go, but my hands still felt the sensations of his hands upon mine. Finally he was back, and his hands were on top of mine again, one of his hands replacing mine across my eyes and his other pulling my hand to where he wanted me to be. All I could hear was the nervous beat of my heart as it tried to work frantically at the pace of my mind, which was working equally as frantically about what was going on, about what this all meant, and work out what the true purpose of this evening was about, since I had obviously gotten it all wrong.

Then he removed his hand from across my eyes, and the dimming sun was bright against my eyes. In front of us on one of the ledges, looking out across the bay and the San Francisco skyline he'd placed a blanket, where he was sitting and waiting for me to join him. He smiled at me nervously once more, and as I sat beside him, he looked at his watch. "There are a couple of minutes left until the sun sets." He informed me, before pulling out his cellphone. He quickly sent a text message to someone, before flipping it shut and staring back out across the bay.

"Wow, this is just amazing. I'm kinda speechless." I blurted out, wanting the awkward silence to stop, wanting to start a conversation, just wanting to know what the whole damn point of this was.

"This memorial is for all the Navy men and women who have sailed out of the bay. It's so beautiful here though, I agree." He then turned and pointed to the Golden Gate Bridge, beside the monument, looking big and gorgeous against the streaking setting sun.

We sat in silence watching the sun set over the skyline, until eventually the lights lining the walls turned on in the dimming light. "Thank you for bringing me here." He smiled a relieved, gorgeous smile that I'd missed and wanted to remember forever, remember being the reason for that beautiful smile.

"You're welcome. But this is just stop one of two. I have another plan in a little while."

"This is breathtakingly beautiful though, watching the sunset… I've never seen it like that before since I've been here, I've never really sat and watched it." I wanted to say so much more in that moment, wanted to say all the words I felt, but I couldn't convey just how truly special it all was to me.

"I'm glad you came here with me." He said softly to the cooling evening, as I began to wrap myself up in my sweatshirt.

"Are you cold?" He asked, before handing me his own sweatshirt. I laughed, remembering Dieters comment back in my kitchen. "Aw, and Dieter thought you weren't a gentleman?" He laughed too, but we remained in companionable silence, each of us with our own thoughts running through our minds, so many words to say and that needed to be said, but for me at least, didn't want to be said for fear of ruining such a tranquil moment.

Finally he stood to leave and I followed, him immediately reaching for my hand like he'd done a thousand times before. I froze momentarily, long enough for him to pull his hand away and walk ahead of me. I sighed and berated myself, before walking quicker to catch up. "I'm sorry." I said softly, it catching the breeze and interrupting the tranquillity I hadn't wanted to destroy back at the top of the Point, but not reaching his ears.

The ride to his next destination was silent also, as he drove across the bridge to a town by the name of Marin. At Marin, he stopped again in a deserted parking lot, before leading me up another hill. At the top of the hill, he led me over to a blanket laid out already with candles, and we heard someone come up behind us. I looked nervously around, hoping we weren't interrupting someone else's romantic evening, until Dieter appeared with a bag of something which he then handed to Stephen before winking at me and leaving again. I looked at Stephen curiously, as he pointed at the blanket and began to lay out food that had obviously come from the bag Dieter had left. As I sat down and looked at the food, at the flickering candles, anywhere but at Stephen, I couldn't believe all the trouble he'd gone to for me, for us, and I knew somehow that this evening was not going to end exactly the way I'd planned.

We began eating another meal favourite of ours, chicken kebabs, and then twinkling lights in the distance caught my eye. "Oh wow," I breathed out, staring transfixed at the lights of the houseboats in the distance.

"This is such a beautiful view, isn't it? It's one of my favourite places here in San Fran." He said beside me, staring at me as he spoke. "They do fireworks once a month off them too, we should come down here next time and watch them." He looked so hopeful and so much like the Stephen I used to know that my breath caught in my throat once again, all I wanted to do was go back to where this all began and not end up kissing him, not letting him kiss me.

As he put all the trash back in the bag, we sat side by side as we stared out at the lights of the houseboats.

"I'm sorry for what happened in Laguna."

"You don't have to be sorry for it, Stephen. You love Kristin, and I know that, and I shouldn't have expected our pseudo-relationship here to have changed that fact."

"It's over with her for good." I laughed, having heard those words too many times before to actually believe it this time around.

"I'm not going to believe that this time around, I've heard it too many times before."

"This time it is. All the time her dad was yelling at me, at us, for being disrespectful, all I could think was that the kissing, that everything that was about to happen, it wasn't like it used to be, it didn't feel the same anymore. And I couldn't work out why."

I felt tears burning my eyes as I was forced to relive that night once more, and I felt around in my pocket for my cellphone, ready to call Dieter, ready to run back to safety, away from him, away from this conversation, away from reliving heartbreak caused by Stephen Colletti once again.

"Then you picked me up, and you said everything that you said in your car when you dropped me at my parents, and I knew what changed. I wasn't in San Francisco, I wasn't with you, I was with the wrong girl. You said that I shouldn't apologise for you not being what I wanted, but you are now, maybe you were before and I was just blind. I don't know. You told me also that I was weak for Kristin, but the weeks we haven't talked? Those are what rendered me weak. I didn't know what to do with myself, I was going crazy. I couldn't just call you to hang out, drag you on some random road trip looking for a place I'm sure was in San Francisco, because you were mad at me and just done with it all, and I didn't want that. Maybe that makes me selfish. But at least it made me realise now that I want you, and that Kristin is what the time filler was." I sat stunned into silence for a long time, watching the water in front of me instead of him. It was everything I'd wanted to hear from him since I was six years old and we first met, but at the same time, I had too much to say on my too heavy heart, and I knew my words had to be said before anything could happen.

The honesty had to come before we'd mended anything at all.

"Do you know how long I've waited to hear that from you? Since we were about six years old. And maybe that's why I was willing to play second choice for so long. You also probably don't have any idea how much your phone call and then afterwards in the car hurt me. You've hurt me in the past, but that? That kinda sealed the fate for my already fragile heart. I don't even know when it was I basically handed you my heart, but I did, and sometimes all I wanted to do was just ask for it back. Because it felt like it would be so much easier if we'd just been friends, if we'd never kissed at all. It would've been so much less painful too. That's what I was referring to more than anything last night." I heard Stephen open his mouth and close it several times in an obvious desire to interrupt, but he remained silent as we stared out at the lights of the boats. "It's been a constant game with you, a constant game of wishing and hoping and then being heartbroken each time the wishes and the hopes are shattered by your inability to let Kristin go. And then you do special things like tonight and all those other surprises since we've been here, and it makes me want to forget everything, and just let you have my heart. But then I go back to spending weeks missing you more than I want to, and I feel lost all over again. I don't want to keep playing anymore."

"I'm not going back to her again. It's you this time." He broke in at last, obviously unable to remain silent any longer.

"You can't guarantee that though. Look how many times you've promised me you guys are done. You go back to Laguna and you're back with her before I've even made it home."

"It was a mistake, a huge mistake. But with her? I'd never go to this much trouble, I've never felt anywhere near as nervous as I did tonight driving to your apartment, driving here, driving to the Point, and I want to bring you back here every day and just spend time with you having moments like we did up at the Point where it feels like its just us and no one else in the entire world. With her I never felt like that." And then he finished with the words I'd wanted to say to him as he left last night. "I just want to be with you."

And then I found myself cutting us both off from any other words and breaths by kissing him. Finally when we broke away for air, I repeated his words and confessed wanting to say that to him after he left last night.

"You mean; I didn't have to go to all this trouble?" He joked, and I hit him playfully, before he kissed me again.

Finally in the breaths we took between kisses, he wasn't kissing anybody else, and my heart finally could take comfort in that knowledge, believing in its truth for once.


End file.
